He knows the public perception is his late father, former Penn State coach Joe Paterno, didn’t do enough to stop serial child molester and former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Jay talks about the circumstances of how his dad handled the scandal and how he feels his father was scapegoated by Penn State in his 358-page ode to JoePa titled “Paterno Legacy: Enduring Lessons from the Life and Death of My Father.”

“No question there was an attempt to put some blame on Joe that didn’t deserve to be there,” Jay told The Post in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “I know there are going to be some people who won’t read it, that will say, ‘You are just trying to defend your dad.’ But if people read it with an open mind, they’ll come to a very different conclusion.

“They’ll reexamine some things and change some preconceived notions they may have.”

Jay doesn’t waste any time tackling the issue, going into the scandal in Chapter 1, “The Elephant in the Room.” It’s a defense of the accusations made against his father in the Freeh Report (put together by former FBI director Louis Freeh), which Jay called “so inaccurate.” Jay, still a fervent Penn State fan who lives in State College, Pa., insists his father did nothing wrong.

“When assistant Mike McQueary told Joe Paterno in 2001 he witnessed Sandusky involved with a 10-year-old boy in an “extremely sexual” manner,” the elder Paterno reported the news to then athletic director Tim Curley, and never had any visual evidence himself of Sandusky’s evil side. Sandusky is currently serving a 30-to-60-year prison sentence for sexual abuse.

Jerry SanduskyPhoto: AP

“Jerry Sandusky had his day in court,” said Jay, who played for Penn State and spent 17 years on his dad’s staff. “My dad didn’t. He was convicted by a lot of people in the public domain without really having the chance to state his case. I think that will come through in the first chapter.

“The story needed to be told. There were some misconceptions about my dad’s life. The NCAA on Thursday announced guidelines to how a school should handle sexual assault [accusations] and they are really what Joe Paterno and Penn State did. The reality is my dad handled it exactly the way he was supposed to, whether it was good, bad or different. It’s based on the law.”

In Chapter 24, entitled “The Firing, Tempest, and Et Tu Brute,” Jay details the days from when the scandal broke up to his father’s ouster. He calls out by name several members of the board of trustees who participated in the unanimous vote to fire his father. Many were lifelong friends of the Paternos, yet none spoke to Joe Paterno before the decision to terminate him was made.

“There was a media storm,” he said. “No question there was a bit of, ‘How should we best handle this?’ and that’s let’s fire Joe. He’s the most viable person in this whole thing.”

The book isn’t only about the Sandusky scandal; two chapters are devoted to it. It touches on Joe’s entire life, as a football coach, father, grandfather and educator. But the prevailing purpose of the book, from Jay’s point of view, is to provide an inside look at his father, the kind of man who would never sweep a scandal such as Sandusky’s under the rug.

“This is a book of lessons in his life, and the lessons carry through what happened in the last few months of his life,” Jay said.